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Power Cables' UV Flashes Apparently Frighten Animals

Posted by timothy on from the what-can-you-see? dept.

Rambo Tribble writes "Ultraviolet light flashes, or "corona", may be scaring animals and altering behavior. An international scientific team, first studying behavioral anomalies in reindeer near power lines, have found that sporadic flashes of UV from the lines are probably responsible. As most mammals can see into the UV spectrum, this has broad implications for the disruption of animal behavior. From the BBC article: "Since, as the researchers added, coronas 'happen on all power lines everywhere,' the avoidance of the flashes could be having a global impact on wildlife.""

14 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Protection from Deer Car accidents by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After reading the article this may prove to be a solution to the numerous deer car collisions. I might try this given the number of deer in my area.

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    1. Re:Protection from Deer Car accidents by NeverVotedBush · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here is what the corona discharges look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Pretty amazing, really.

  2. Is "impact" such a bad thing? by JoeyRox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does everything humans do that affects animal behavior need to be altered or fixed? In this case the "impact" is simply that the animals stay away from the power lines. There are countless naturally-occurring things in nature that have similar kinds of "impact".

    1. Re:Is "impact" such a bad thing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What if those power lines cross a major migration route? Or block a nesting ground or food source? It's nothing personal, but I hate when people just say, "Well it's probably not a big deal." To us it may not seem like it, but to everything else it might be. We are the single most invasive species on the planet. That will eventually come back to haunt us.

    2. Re:Is "impact" such a bad thing? by JoeyRox · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Fair enough, but animals (like humans) are supremely adaptable. So the question remains - why is it a big deal if animal behavior is altered?

      And calling humans an invasive species discounts our role in nature. We have survived through the evolution of our intelligence. The application of that intelligence includes altering nature to the full extent that we're able to in order to support our success as a species. All species do this to the full extent that they're able.

    3. Re:Is "impact" such a bad thing? by jonnythan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because we have power lines everywhere and as far as I know we haven't really spent a lot of time considering the possibility that a simple power line is a de facto boundary to an animal's habitat. It's kind of a big deal when there are serious, important aspects of land use planning and environmental conservation that absolutely rely on accurately predicting and knowing an animal's range and habitat.

    4. Re:Is "impact" such a bad thing? by dave420 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I appreciate your stance, but this whole "but X is adaptable!" answer to having to change our behaviour to help X is clearly limited. We need to know the scale of the impact before we know if they're adaptable enough to adapt to the changes we are throwing at them. I'm sure you appreciate that if the change we are talking about is simply making them walk 1 meter out of their way - they can probably adapt to that. If the change is causing them to jump off cliffs, there's not much adaptability that would work in that case.

      Are you aware that we rely on other species to survive? We evolved with those other species around - removing them from our environment might indeed change the balance of wildlife to the point where things we directly rely on start being affected by our changes to other species. Yes, humans are awesome and clever and can fly and go to the moon and everything, but we still breathe the same air as other (air-breathing) animals, drink the same water, and live on the same planet.

      Our role in nature should be to not mess with nature so much that we die out. The status quo got us this far - changing it too much is not a good idea. Science can tell us what constitutes "too much", and ignoring that is folly. Suicidal folly.

  3. Reindeer by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, of course reindeer are especially scared of power lines. They're a hazard for most low-flying objects.

  4. Troll Hunter! by Max+Threshold · · Score: 5, Funny

    Troll Hunter really was a documentary.

  5. DC transmission lines? by ACluk90 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was wondering whether there UV flash also exist for DC transmission lines. Is there any expert around who knows that?

    This is of interest as it is very difficult to build new power lines all over Europe, usually resulting in around 20 years of legal battle for a mere 30 km of power lines far away from any densely populated area. This is just slightly reduced for buried transmission lines with all their disadvantages. Thus a current idea/discussion is to hang DC power lines on existing poles for long distance transmission.

    1. Re:DC transmission lines? by kyrsjo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would think so - corona discharges are dependent on electric field, not frequency (and 50/60 Hz is pretty much DC anyway).

  6. Magnetic fields too by tomhath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Many animals can see or detect the Earth's magnetic field. I have to believe those transmission lines and arcing cause some serious anomalies in what they sense.

  7. Re:What about Infrared light? by compro01 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thermal emissions from body heat are a fair ways into the IR range, around 8000-15000nm. For reference, human vision peters out around 700nm. I believe it's only possible to detect that with specialized sensory organs, such as pit viper's eponymous thermal pits.

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  8. Don't confuse "near" and "thermal" IR. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thermal IR (the wavelengths emitted by things around body temperature) is really low-energy. It's hard to focus, and hard to detect, especially with a detector that's already in the same temperature range. Pit vipers, vampire bats and some other animals do it, but the mechanism's fundamentally different from normal vision, and doesn't provide much in the way of an actual focused image. (The pit viper's pit is sort of like a pinhole camera with a really big pinhole.)

    Near-IR, the kind of thing that cheap digital security cameras can see, is higher-energy. It can be emitted thermally, but you've got to get pretty hot (hundreds of degrees) to produce significant amounts. Go a little hotter, and you can produce visible light ("red-hot", "white-hot", etc.).

    Even near-IR is hard to pick up with a chemical process, though, the way retinal cells pick up visible light. I'm not aware of any animals that can see significantly further than us into the near-IR -- okay, a bit of Googling turned up one fish that can do it.